Trivia

The End Of The Affair was previously filmed in 1955, with Deborah Kerr and Van Johnson

The End Of The Affair location: the house of Maurice Bendrix: Abingdon House, Kew Green

Neil Jordan manages to bring an austere poetry to the exhausted shabbiness of the Forties in this adaptation of the Graham Greene novel, saturated with the author’s trademark Catholicism, sex and guilt.

The End Of The Affair location: the ‘Cafe Royal’: Sheraton Park Lane Hotel, Piccadilly

The End Of The Affair location: Bendrix meets up with the private detective: Prince Alfred, Formosa Street, Maida Vale

Almost as gleaming and impressive is the carved-wood and etched-glass bar where Maurice Bendrix (Ralph Fiennes) receives evidence of supposed ‘intimacy’ by his ex-lover, Sarah Miles (Julianne Moore), from private detective Parkis (Ian Hart). It’s the Prince Alfred, 5a Formosa Street, Maida Vale, seen also in Michael Radford’s artsy B Monkey, Chen Kaige’s misfired erotic thriller Killing Me Softly, and in the broad 1991 comedy King Ralph, with John Goodman inheriting the British throne.

The bar retains its original ‘snob screens’ from an earlier age, when patrons were divided up by class and gender to patronise separate, smaller rooms. Although each has its own outdoor entrance, you can access the various bars from inside by what are essentially glorified ‘cat flaps’, intended for the use of bar staff and cleaners. You’ll struggle to retain your dignity, but I’ll bet you won’t be able to resist trying.

The End Of The Affair location: Parkis spies on Sarah Miles: Priory Church of St Bartholomew the Great, Smithfield, London

The devout but conflicted Sarah remonstrates with God in the Priory Church of St Bartholomew the Great, West Smithfield, while Parkis and his son spy on her. London's oldest surviving church, St Bartholomew’s, which gives its name to the famous hospital alongside, was founded in 1123 as an Augustinian Priory, and has been in continuous use since at least 1143.

North, near Angel in Islington, stands the handsome Georgian Myddelton Square. On the west side, at Inglebert Street, 63-65 Myddelton Square is the home of Father Smythe (Jason Isaacs), Sarah’s priestly confidant. The normally elegant terraces, dating from 1827, are made to look weedy and grubby, but don’t be fooled. This is a highly desirable address.

Across the street is the Anglican Gothic St Mark’s Church, is Smythe’s church where Sarah finds the investigator’s boy asleep in the doorway.

The tube station staircase, seen as Sarah hurries to meet Bendrix at the restaurant, is the largely unmodernised Maida Vale station on the Bakerloo Line (you can see its exterior masquerading as the fictitious ‘Westbourne Oak Station’ in the 2014 film of Paddington).

The End Of The Affair location: Bendrix pursues Sarah from the cinema: Phoenix Finchley, East Finchley, London

Another location previously used by Neil Jordan is the old movie palace which Sarah flees pursued by Bendrix. It’s the Phoenix Cinema, 52 High Road, East Finchley, the UK’s oldest purpose-built cinema in continuous use, which became the ‘American’ picture house visited by Louis (Brad Pitt) in Interview With The Vampire.

‘Clapham Common’ is largely Battersea Park, though Bendrix’s house, supposedly on the Common, is Abingdon House, 61 Kew Green, near to the famous Royal Botanic Gardens. The corrugated iron alongside masks, not a bombed site, but Kew Gardens’ herbarium building. In fact, you can catch a glimpse of one of the gardens’ entrances in the background as Bendrix runs across the green to stop Sarah’s cab.

The End Of The Affair location: the flying bomb hits the church: Kew Green

Across Kew Green, the church, on which the V1s (Nazi Germany’s terrifying flying bombs) fall, is the Parish Church of St Anne.

Maurice and Sarah spend a weekend at the East Sussex seaside resort of Brighton, appearing as seedy as it does in Greene’s Brighton Rock. The pair inevitably pay a visit to the famous mock-Oriental Royal Pavilion.

The End Of The Affair location: Sarah unburdens herself in church: St Mary Magdalene, Woodchester Square

The church in which Sarah unburdens herself as peace breaks out at the end of WWII is St Mary Magdalene, Woodchester Square. The same church is used for the memorial service in The Constant Gardener, which also stars Ralph Fiennes. Its exterior can be seen in 1949 British classic The Blue Lamp and is also glimpsed in Joseph Losey’s bizarre Secret Ceremony.

Sarah’s funeral is held among the flamboyant Victorian monuments of Kensal Green Cemetery, Harrow Road, where Bendrix is told of the miraculous disappearance of the investigator’s boy’s birthmark. You can see more of this Gothic extravaganza in the gloriously tasteless Vincent Price horror comedy Theatre Of Blood.